in so many words

You probably won’t read about this on Yahoo! News or CNN, or see it on “Good Morning, America”. It won’t be front page news in your local paper and probably won’t be the talk of the office at the water cooler tomorrow morning. But this morning at 2:45 A.M., Larry Norman passed away, a little over a month shy of his 61st birthday. Today, and for several days to come, there will be hundreds of blogs and articles written about Larry and his effect on modern Christianity and music as well as testimonies to the impact of Larry’s music on individuals (and I am one of those individuals). But even with all that will be written, it will still be difficult if not impossible to fully express Larry’s influence on several generations of musicians and believers. He is known as the grandfather of Christian rock, but he was never comfortable with the multi-million dollar industry that developed out of the ministries of musicians like himself who simply wanted to share their faith through their music. And that message of faith is the main message you got from Larry in everything that he did - he wanted the world to know about Jesus, and his music always expressed that. Of course, as with all who obtain some measure of fame, he didn’t have a perfect life - he was an extremely talented singer/songwriter/musician who, while giving interviews, would brag about himself or drop the names of famous people like an insecure sycophant, as through he needed to validate himself in some way (he didn’t need to). He had a 40+ year career of selling hundreds of thousands of records/tapes/CDs and influencing thousands more who enjoyed his music and admired and respected him, yet at the end of his life he struggled to pay his medical bills. He preached about the compassion of Jesus and and the importance of giving to the poor, and he criticized corporate greed and wealth, yet he offended and broke relationship with some of his musician friends by withholding their royalty payments and the rights to their music for decades (my understanding is that he finally resolved these issues in recent years). He wrote songs with lyrics like “watch what you’re doing”, yet he married the ex-wife of one of his best friends. He was a hypocrite, he made many mistakes and sometimes said foolish things, but maybe that’s part of the reason his songs had such an effect on so many of us - because he was just like us.

I first heard of Larry Norman from the leader of the youth group I attended in 1972. I was one of the group’s musicians, and our leader asked me to play “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” on guitar. When I told her that I’d never heard of that song, she looked at me with wide-eyed amazement and asked “You mean you’ve never heard ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’?. You HAVE to hear this song!”. So I listened, and although I wasn’t impressed on first listen, I soon understood the impact of the song’s concept. A while later I picked up my first Larry Norman album, a record I found at a garage sale and still own - Only Visiting This Planet. It’s still my favorite Larry album, recorded in 1972 in the time period between Upon This Rock and So Long Ago The Garden - many fans consider these three albums Larry’s best work. Larry continued putting out albums, and while many of them were just repackaging of his older songs, some newer albums like 2001’s Tourniquet showed that Larry still had something creative to say. Larry lived in Salem, Oregon for the last several years - it’s only a 6 hour drive from where I live, and I was tempted to drive there and try to meet him, but he didn’t know me and had no reason to meet me, so I never made the trip. He suffered from heart problems and bad health for the last several years, and that is what finally got the best of him, although thankfully he is no longer suffering.

Larry, I know you’re finally resting like never before. To your family I offer my condolences - your fans, me and the thousands all around the world, will miss you, but we’ve all “got to learn to live without you”.

Nothing really changes, everything remains the same, we are what we are ’till the day that we die

Tonight as Emily and I were picking up a half-baked-chicken/half-combination take-and-bake pizza for our romantic Valentine’s Day dinner, our conversation turned into a discussion about a friend who used to attend our church a few years ago. She was in a marriage that really was just a shell, an appearance of a happy Christian married couple that was nothing more than that. She knew something was wrong with the marriage and even tried to get help from our pastors, but her husband didn’t seem to see the need to really work at getting their relationship right and she didn’t seem to be able or ready to end the marriage, so they just continued with the facade, partly for the benefit of their 20ish daughter and teen aged son. Recently we heard that the husband - late 40s - had moved out and is living with a 20-something girl who is a friend of the daughter. And our friend had gotten together with a guy we all know who has just come though a divorce. Because we know this divorced guy, I am concerned about her - she’s a smart and funny lady and I’ve always enjoyed her company, but it seems to me that with this new relationship she has “gone from the frying pan into the fire”. I also commented to Emily that our friend should have divorced her husband a while ago, back during the time when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to work to save his marriage.

“Wait a minute”, you say. “Aren’t you a Christian? Don’t you think divorce is a sin? Doesn’t God hate divorce? If there was no adultery how can you tell someone that they should divorce?” Yes, I am a Christian. In fact, I am a Christian who went through a divorce. In 1993 my wife left me and my 2 kids. It was incredibly horrible - I still refer to 1993 as “the year from hell”. Yes, I do think divorce is a sin. So is lying, stealing, gossiping, murder, adultery and cheating on your taxes. And I believe that all of these sins, including divorce, can be forgiven. Yes, God did say that He hates divorce (you can look that one up in Malachi 2:16 if you’re so inclined) and I understand that - I hate divorce as well. But I also believe that God hates other things too. And I believe that sometimes He may hate an unloving and emotionally abusive marriage more than divorce. Especially when it effects the kids or involves physical abuse.

There was a time in my life when I would not even consider divorce as an option - for myself or anyone else. But life has a way of slapping us in the face with reality, causing us to give up preconceptions and legalisms. And God is big enough to love us in spite of our mistakes, or in spite of the effect that the mistakes of others have on us. So these days I don’t obsess so much about divorce - mine or anyone else’s. I think divorce is sad, destructive and painful, and I think it is usually best if a couple can work out their differences, or at least, as Bruce Springsteen puts it, “learn to live with what you can’t rise above”. But sometimes in this life, or even many times, we don’t get to choose between a right decision and a wrong decision - sometimes our options only allow us to choose the lesser evil, and trust that God can forgive us anyway.

All of us have a heartache, all of us have been stained

This morning, my friend Jane died of cancer. It was a shock to me, not because of the cancer - I knew she had it - but because I hadn’t talked with her or her husband Cy since August and I didn’t know that the cancer had advanced that far. Jane developed cancer several years ago, but went into remission. Then earlier this year she was told that the cancer was back, and she started treatment. But this summer the doctors discovered that the cancer had moved into her lymph nodes, which is very bad news.

Jane was an artist. She was very creative - it seemed like she always had some kind of project that she was working on. Several years ago she gave me a watercolor painting of a barn in a field, which is one of my favorite pieces of art and is still hanging on my living room wall. She was very kind, with a quiet wisdom that only made me feel encouraged when she offered her advice. She seemed to enjoy my sense of humor, and we could get together after long periods of absence and talk and laugh with ease. She was not a vegetarian, but she and Cy loved veggies and she made them a part of most of her meals, and she also who grew a lot of her own food. I don’t care for veggies, and that was the source of a little joke between us about vegetables. Once when I was visiting she gave me a small bag of sugar candies made to look like peas and carrots. I guess she thought that was the only way to get me to eat veggies.

Cy and Jane were married 29 years, and they genuinely loved each other. They struggled through the same things many couples struggle with - trying to buy their first house, seasons where the money was tight, raising Jane’s two boys from her first marriage, then having two more children, a boy and a girl… typical married-life issues. And they were good friends to me as I struggled through my life… tolerant of me as a young rowdy musician type, compassionate when my first marriage ended in divorce, encouraging as I spent several years living single, and supportive when I married Emily. In fact, Jane and Emily found they were kindred spirits, both of them being creative women who lived their lives following Jesus, and both being artists who came to appreciate each other’s work. I’m disappointed that they didn’t get to spend more time together.

As I spoke with Cy he wondered aloud why someone, a wife and mother as kind as Jane, should die from cancer while people like terrorists or brutal dictators live seemingly healthy lives. This is probably a question of faith that comes to many - why does God allow evil people to live while good people suffer painful deaths. I think the answer is faith itself - do we trust God, not just in good and pleasant times, but in light of terrible, painful events? If we believe in God, can we say that we trust Him in all things, even with the life - or death - of a loved one? Can we cry out in our grief that, even though we don’t see or understand the reason, we believe that God has a reason, and we trust Him?

For Cy, who misses his wife terribly, his response is simply:
“Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him“.

I have noticed that people here in America sometimes - well, alot of the time - get the wrong impression about God. For example, there is a popular bumper sticker here that you may have seen - it reads “Don’t drive faster than your Guardian Angel can fly!” Personally, I have never thought it was even possible to drive a car faster than an angel can fly. If you believe in God and believe that He created angels as supernatural beings, capable of performing His miraculous work - the very idea that we as humans can make a machine that can travel faster than an angel is either somewhat foolish or a bit arrogant. And I think that this kind of misunderstanding of God misrepresents God.

But there are different ways that people misrepresent God. There is a web site - I’m not going to print an address so as to not give it any more publicity (and there are probably several websites like this anyway) - a web site that is more than just foolish or arrogant… it promotes hatred of people in the name of God. Unfortunately, there are multiple websites that do this, but this particular web site claims to be “Christian”, to being followers of God and believers in Jesus… yet preaches that God hates people. Not all people, of course - just people who are homosexual. The group responsible for this web site recite their favorite bible verses in an effort to convince visitors that God truly hates homosexuals. And that homosexuals are going to hell, no questions asked. But what this website is really doing is misrepresenting God. They are misrepresenting God by twisting His words in an obvious effort to defend and promote their personal beliefs. Now, I’m no one in particular and certainly not in the position to engage these misguided people, nor do I simply want to get involved in an argument for argument’s sake or throw my pearls before swine. But what I do want to say, to gay and straight people, from what I have read and learned and lived and know about God, is that these gay-hating-website people are as wrong about God as is humanly possible. That God loves homosexuals. That He loves homosexuals as much as He loves hetros. That He loves homosexuals as much as He loves Baptists, soccer moms, priests, yuppies, car thieves, Catholics, liberals, Muslims, goth teenagers, Bill Gates, hippies, bikers, African children with AIDS, conservatives, drug addicts, my first wife, rude fast food workers, high school cheerleaders with perfect teeth, socialists, Wal-Mart greeters, Ronald Reagan, the jerk who promised to build me a custom guitar body and then gave me nothing but kept my $90 deposit, Nicolas Sarkozy, porn stars, drunken neighbors, tree-huggers, Joe Walsh and me. In other words, God loves people. All people. This is such a central theme of the Bible that to suggest anything else is highly deceptive at best and plain evil at worst. Evil not just because they are spreading hatred in the name of God… that of course is bad enough. But even more evil because these people claim to represent God and claim that they are declaring His words. So visitors to that web site might assume that these hate-preachers know God and know his desires, and the visitors may be deceived into believing that this is what God is really like… in other words, that web site is misrepresenting God, with the real evil being that they are causing people to misunderstand God. They are describing God based on personally selected, self-serving portions of scripture instead of understanding the full message of the gospel, which is a message of love, forgiveness, restoration and reconciliation. They are confining God to their limited understanding of His love instead of accepting that God’s love is beyond our understanding. And they are creating a god who is too small to love everyone instead of preaching about the god who is big enough to love anyone.

And God even loves these hate-preachers… yes, I do believe that He does love them. But I also believe that He hates what they are doing.

I believe in God the Father… almighty Maker of Heaven and Maker of Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, He was crucified and dead and buried.

And I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am. I did not make it, no it is making me. It is the very truth of God, not the invention of any man.

I believe that He who suffered was crucified, buried, and dead. He descended into hell, and on the third day He rose again. He ascended into Heaven, where He sits at God’s mighty right hand. I believe that He’s returning to judge the quick and the dead of the sons of men.

I believe in God the Father, almighty Maker of Heaven, and Maker of Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, my Lord. I believe in the Holy Spirit, One Holy Church, the communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins. I believe in the resurrection… I believe in a life that never ends.

And I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am.

(The Nicene Creed as adapted by Rich Mullins)